kottke.org posts about Joshua Yaffa

After the publication of Envisioning Information, Tufte decided, he told me, "to be indifferent to culture or history or time." He became increasingly consumed with what he calls "forever knowledge," or the idea that design is meant to guide fundamental cognitive tasks and therefore is rooted in principles that apply regardless of the material being displayed and the technology used to produce it. As Tufte explains it, basic human cognitive questions are universal, which means that design questions should be universal too. "I purposely don't write books with names like How to Design a Web Site or How to Make a Presentation," he told me.